Part 8
What! it surprises you that the question as to whether the basin was a basin or a helmet should have given rise to a general dispute? Other and more involved disputes have broken out in the world with regard to other basins and those not belonging to Mambrino. As to whether bread is bread and wine wine and the like. Human sheep flock round Knights of the Faith and maintain for various reasons or for no reason at all, that the basin is a helmet, as the Knights assert, and they are surprisingly rewarded for so maintaining it, and the strange thing is that most of those who contend that it is a helmet really believe it to be a basin. The heroism of Don Quixote communicated itself to his mockers, who became quixotized in spite of themselves, and Don Fernando made one of the pursuivants measure his length on the ground because he had dared to maintain that the basin was not a helmet but a basin. Heroical Don Fernando!
Thus we see Don Quixote’s mockers mocked by him, quixotized in their own despite, joining in the fray and fighting with all their might to defend the Faith of the Knight, although without sharing it. I am convinced--although Cervantes does not tell us so--I am convinced that the partisans of the Knight, the quixotists or helmetists, after having received and administered punishment, began themselves to doubt whether the basin were a basin and to believe that it really was the helmet of Mambrino, for their ribs bore evidence of their belief. It must be affirmed here yet again that it is martyrs who create faith rather than faith that creates martyrs.
In few of his adventures does Don Quixote appear greater than in this one, in which he imposes his faith upon those who mocked at it, so that they are led to defend it with kicks and blows and to suffer for it.
And what was it that inspired them to do so? Simply his courage in affirming before everybody that that basin, which he no less than they saw with his own eyes to be a basin, was the helmet of Mambrino, for to him it served the office of a helmet.
This is the courage of the purest water--that which resists not merely a shock to the reason or decay of fortune or loss of honour, but also being taken for a madman and an idiot.
This is the courage that we need in Spain and our soul remains paralysed because of the lack of it. It is because of the lack of it that we are neither powerful nor wealthy nor cultured; it is because of the lack of it that we have no system of irrigation, no good harvests; it is because of the lack of it that it doesn’t rain more on our drought-parched fields, or that when it does rain it rains in torrents, sweeping away the manure and sometimes sweeping away the houses too.
This seems to you like a paradox? Go into the country and propose to any farmer some improvement in his methods of cultivation or the introduction of a new kind of crop or of a new agricultural machine, and he will say: “That doesn’t pay here.” “Have you tried it?” you ask, and he simply repeats: “That doesn’t pay here.” He doesn’t know whether it pays or whether it doesn’t pay, for he hasn’t tried it and doesn’t mean to try it. He would try it if he were sure of its success beforehand, but the prospect of the possibility of a failure, with the consequent mockery and derision of his neighbours, the possibility of their taking him for a deluded fool or a lunatic, this prospect terrifies him and so he doesn’t experiment. And then people are surprised at the triumph of those who have the courage to face ridicule serenely, of those who rid themselves of the herd-instinct.
In the province of Salamanca there was a remarkable man who rose from the greatest poverty to be a millionaire. The peasants of the district, with the sheep-like instincts of their kind, were only able to explain his success by supposing that in his younger days he had embezzled money, for these wretched peasants, crusted over with common sense and entirely lacking in moral courage, believe only in theft and the lottery. But one day I was told of a quixotic feat which this cattle farmer had performed. It seems that he had brought sea-bream’s spawn from the Cantabrian coast to put in one of his ponds! When I heard that, I understood everything. He who has the courage to face the jeers which are bound to be provoked by bringing the spawn of a salt-water fish to put in a pond in Castile, he who does that deserves his fortune.
But it was absurd, you say? And who knows what is absurd and what is not? And even if it were! Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. There is only one way of hitting the nail on the head and that is by hammering on the shoe a hundred times. And there is only one way of achieving a real triumph and that is by facing ridicule with serenity. And it is because our agriculturists haven’t the courage to face ridicule that our agriculture languishes in its present backward condition.
Yes, all our ills spring from moral cowardice, from the individual’s lack of staunch resolution in affirming his own truth, his own faith, and defending it. The soul of this people, this flock of somnolent sheep, is smothered and swathed in falsehood, and their stupidity proceeds from their very excess of prudence.
It is claimed that there are certain principles that are beyond discussion and when anyone attempts to criticize them the air rings with shouts of protest. Not long ago I proposed that we should demand the abolition of certain of the articles of our law of Public Instruction, and a pack of poltroons began to bellow that such a course was inopportune and impertinent, not to mention stronger and more offensive epithets that were used. I am sick of hearing everything that is most opportune called inopportune, everything that tends to disturb the digestion of the full-bellied and infuriates fools. What are they afraid of? That it will result in a brawl? that a new civil war will break out? Better and better. That’s what we need.
Yes, that’s what we need--a new civil war. It is necessary to assert that basins ought to be and are helmets and to get up a fight about it like the fight they got up at the inn. A new civil war, let the weapons be what they will. Can’t you hear those spiritless creatures whose hearts are dried and shrivelled up reiterating that these kinds of disputes lead to nothing practical? What do they understand by practical? Can’t you hear them reiterating that there are discussions which ought never to be broached?
There are plenty of cowardly spirits who are always drilling it into us that we ought to leave religious questions on one side, that the first thing to do is to become powerful and wealthy. And the poltroons don’t see that it is just because we ignore what concerns our inward well-being that we are not and never shall be wealthy and powerful. I repeat it yet again, there will never be any agriculture or industry or commerce in our country, nor roads where there ought to be roads, until we have discovered our Christianity, which is Quixotic Christianity. We shall never have a powerful and splendid and glorious and strong external life until we have kindled in the hearts of our people the fire of the eternal disquietudes. We cannot be rich so long as our life is nothing but deceit, and deceit is our spirit’s daily bread.
Can’t you hear the solemn ass that opens his mouth and says: “It’s forbidden to say that here”? Can’t you hear all those who are bound with the fetters of falsehood talking about peace, a peace that is more deadly than death itself? That terrible and ignominious rule which figures in the list of regulations of almost all the social clubs in Spain, “political and religious discussions prohibited”--does that say nothing to you?
Peace! peace! peace! all the frogs of our national pond croak in chorus.
Peace! peace! peace! Yes, but peace established upon the triumph of sincerity, peace established upon the overthrow of falsehood. Peace, but not a peace of compromise, not a hollow political agreement, but a comprehensive peace. Peace, yes, but only after the pursuivants have recognized Don Quixote’s right to assert that the basin is a helmet; and, furthermore, only after the pursuivants themselves have admitted and affirmed that in the hands of Don Quixote the basin is a helmet. And the wretched crowd that shout “Peace! peace!” dare to take upon their lips the name of Christ! They forget that Christ said that He came not to bring peace but war, and that because of Him they of the same household should be divided against one another, father against son and brother against brother. And this should be because of Him, because of Christ, that His kingdom might be established, the social kingdom of Jesus--which is the very reverse of that which the Jesuits call the social kingdom of Jesus Christ--the kingdom of real sincerity and real truth and real love and real peace. In order that the kingdom of Jesus may be established, there must be war.
DON QUIXOTE’S NIECE[3]
The good Alonso Quixano went on with the dictation of his will and bequeathed all his estate to Antonia Quixano, his niece, but imposing it upon her, as a necessary condition of enjoying the bequest, that “if she is desirous of marrying, she marry none but a man who, upon strict inquiry, shall be found never to have read a book of knight-errantry in his life; and in case it appears that he has been conversant with such books, and that she persists in her resolution to marry him, she is then to forfeit all that I have bequeathed her, which in such case my executors shall dispose of to pious uses at their own discretion.”
How clearly Don Quixote recognized the violent mutual incompatibility that exists between the office of husband and that of knight-errant! And in dictating this clause, may not the good knight have been thinking of his Aldonza and of how, had he but ventured to break the seal of his too great love, he might have been spared all the misfortunes of his knight-errantry and remained by his own fireside a happy prisoner in the arms of his love?
Your will has been faithfully executed, Don Quixote, and the young men of this your country have renounced all knight-errantry so that they might enjoy the estates of your nieces--and among these must be counted almost all the women of Spain--and enjoy the nieces themselves too. In their arms all heroism is smothered. They tremble lest it should strike their lovers and husbands with its rushing wind as it struck their uncle. It is your niece, Don Quixote, it is your niece who rules and governs Spain to-day--it is your niece, not Sancho. It is the timorous, home-keeping, narrow-souled Antonia Quixano, she who feared lest you should turn poet, “a catching and incurable disease”; she who so zealously assisted the curate and the barber in burning your books; she who presumed to tell you to your face that all stories of knight-errantry were nothing but a pack of lies and fables--a maidenly audacity which provoked you to exclaim: “By the God that sustains me, wert thou not my proper niece, my own sister’s daughter, I would take such revenge for the blasphemy thou hast uttered as would resound through the whole world”; it is she, “the young baggage who scarce knows how to manage a dozen lace-work bobbins,” and who presumed to put in her oar and censure the histories of knights-errant, it is she who manages and dangles and juggles with the sons of your Spain as if they were puppets. It is not Dulcinea del Toboso, no. Neither is it Aldonza Lorenzo, she for whom you sighed for twelve years without seeing her more than four times and without ever confessing your love. It is Antonia Quixano, she who scarce knew how to manage a dozen lace-work bobbins, who controls your countrymen to-day.
It is Antonia Quixano, who, because she has a small soul and no belief in her husband’s greatness, keeps him at home and hinders him from going forth to seek heroic adventures which would win him glory and an everlasting name. If it were only Dulcinea!... Dulcinea, yes, for however strange it may seem, Dulcinea can make a man renounce all glory, can make him choose the glory of renouncing glory. Dulcinea, or let us rather call her Aldonza, the ideal Aldonza might say to him: “Come, come to my arms and let all your wild longings melt away in tears upon my breast. Come to me. Yes, I see you set up on a lofty pinnacle for all time, I see all your brother men gazing up at you, I see you acclaimed by generations yet unborn--but come to me, renounce it all for my sake, and that will make you great, my Alonso, that will make you greater still. Take my mouth and cover it with warm kisses in silence, and renounce a cold eternity of fame in the mouths of those whom you will never know. Will you hear them speaking of you when you are dead? Bury all your love in my breast, and if it is a great love, it is better that you should bury it in me than that you should lavish it among men who easily forget and soon pass away. They are not worthy of admiring you, my Alonso, they are not worthy of it. You will live for me alone and so you will live more truly for all the universe and for God. So living, your might and your heroism will seem to be lost, but don’t mind that. Do you not know the infinite streams of life which flow from a silent and heroic love, flowing out in wave after wave beyond humanity to the orbit of the remotest of the stars? Do you not know that the silent and triumphant love of a happy pair of lovers is a fount of mysterious energy that irradiates a whole people and all generations to come to the end of time? Do you not know what it is to guard the sacred fire of life, fanning it to ever brighter flame in simple and silent worship? Love, the simple act of loving, without deeds, is itself a heroic deed. Come and renounce all your deeds in my arms--the dim obscurity of your repose in my arms will be a seed-time which will bear fruit in the deeds and glory of others to whom your very name will be unknown. When even the echo of your name is no longer borne upon the air, when there is no longer any air to bear the echo of it, the embers of your love will warm the ruins of perished worlds. Come and give yourself to me, Alonso, for though you should never ride abroad redressing wrongs, your greatness will not be lost, for in my heart nothing is lost. Come, rest your head upon my heart and I will carry you thence to the rest that has no ending.”
With such words Aldonza might speak, and in renouncing all glory in her arms Alonso would be truly great; but such words you can never speak, Antonia. You do not believe that love is of more worth than glory; what you believe is that neither love nor glory is worth as much as sleepy fireside peace and quiet, that neither love nor glory is worth as much as the certainty of the daily mess of pottage; you believe that those who don’t sleep easily in their beds come to a bad end, and you don’t know that love, like glory, never sleeps but watches.
THE RELIGION OF QUIXOTISM
I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, _La Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life--_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_. This philosophy of ours could with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was a-philosophical, positivist, technicist, given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimistic.
We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers--in Don Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. Was not perhaps the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all, the philosophy latent in the abstract but passionate thought of our mystics, in its essence none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?
And the feeling that animated Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was spiritualism; he fought for the spirit.
Speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like practical Quixotism, foolishness, a daughter-foolishness to the foolishness of the cross. And therefore it is contemned by reason. Philosophy at bottom abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.
The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought by means of ridicule to turn it into comedy and conceived the farce of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, saying: “Behold the man!” But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, cried: “Crucify him! crucify him!” And the other tragedy, the human, the intra-human tragedy, is that of Don Quixote with his face lathered for the ducal servants to laugh at, and for the dukes, as much slaves as their servants, to laugh at too. “Behold the fool!”--so they would say. And the comic, the irrational tragedy is suffering beneath ridicule and contempt.
For an individual, as for a people, the highest heroism is being willing to face ridicule--still more, being willing to make oneself ridiculous and not flinching at the ridicule.
Antero de Quental, the tragic Portuguese who committed suicide, wrote as follows, smarting under the ultimatum which England delivered to his country in 1890: “An English statesman of the last century, also certainly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we have to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we much prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that _thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny is to end miserably and comically.” We may leave on one side the assertion that England thinks and calculates, implying that she does not feel, the injustice of which is explained by the circumstance that provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they scarcely ever think or calculate--for we sister peoples of the Atlantic have always been distinguished by a certain sentimental pedantry; but there remains the terrible underlying idea, namely, that some, those who put thought above feeling--I should say reason above faith--die comically, and those die tragically who put faith above reason. For it is the ridiculers who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the portion, the noble portion, of those who are ridiculed is tragedy.
And what we must look out for in the record of Don Quixote is ridicule.
* * * * *
The philosophy in the soul of my people presents itself to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between the world as the reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be, as our religious faith tells us that it is. And in this philosophy is to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_, that is to say, that we do not resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.
“In any case the result of all this,” so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, “will simply be to urge people on to the maddest kind of Catholicism.” And they have accused me of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And what then?
Yes, I know, I know that it is folly to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is the crowd that seeks the medicine for its ills in the past; but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatsoever, even though it may seem to belong to the past, is urging the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present. Every pretended restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past is dream, something not properly known, so much the better. As always, the march is towards the future; he who marches, marches thither, even though he march backwards way--and who knows if that is not the better way?
I feel that I have a mediæval soul and I believe that the soul of my country is mediæval--that it has been forced to traverse the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution, learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual heritage of those ages that are called dark. And Quixotism is nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages against their offspring, the Renaissance.
And if some accuse me of furthering the cause of Catholic reaction, perhaps the others, the official Catholics, accuse me of.... But these, in Spain trouble themselves little about anything and are only interested in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they are somewhat dull of understanding.
But the fact is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to shatter the faith of both these and those and of others besides, faith in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who resign themselves, whether to Catholicism or to rationalism or to agnosticism; it is to make them all live lives of inquietude and passionate desire.
Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the immediate and visible efficacy of his work? It is greatly to be doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting the visor he had made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter so long as he himself thus lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have another and a higher efficacy--namely, that it would go on working in the minds of all those who in the spirit of devotion read of his exploits.
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous, but did he perchance know the most tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule that is reflected in the eyes of a man’s own soul, the ridicule with which a man sees his own self? Transfer Don Quixote’s battlefield to his own soul; conceive him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, not to lose the treasure of his infancy; turn him into an inward Don Quixote--with his Sancho, a Sancho equally inward and equally heroical at his side--and then talk to me of the comic tragedy.
And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions, books--we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any “Critique of Pure Reason.”